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Sapphire author, Edward Fahey will present his third novel on Friday, May 22nd at 6:30 p.m. The Gardens of Ailana explores the metaphysical, the idea that there are places on this planet not confined to the logic of men or limitations of science. In this modern-day fictional tale, four people with very different backgrounds, each scarred by a horrific childhood, meet at a place of healing where one’s most crippling darkness must be faced down. In the rubble of their lives and broken spirits they learn that in their weaknesses lie their most profound strengths. In their festering wounds they find hope. In The Gardens of Ailana we see through the souls of mystics, experience laying-on-of-hands from the healer’s point of view. Feel at home among wonders and magic. Fahey says of The Gardens of Ailana, “This is the book others have been laying the groundwork for and building towards.” Novelist and teacher, Fahey spent his life hunting magic, seeking out the other sides of reality. His previous novels are Mourning After and Entertaining Naked People. To reserve any of his books please call City Lights Bookstore at 828-586-9499.

I have known my work is “Literary Fiction” in that every word counts, and the characters are rich, multi-layered, complex. It is “Magic Realism” in that it reads as though this is just an everyday story while making laying-on-of-hands, reincarnation and such clearly part of that reality, and relevant to our strained and challenging modern lives. But now with the sub-genre “Visionary Fiction” I get the rest of it. Ancient principles and teachings shared without preaching. Powerful emphasis on the limitless potential each has for growth and transformation. These are the bases for every one of my novels. It is all there now. Thank you so much for this new discovery, Ellis Nelson.

I keep hearing that so-and-so did something pretty nasty, or selfish “for a theosophist”. But to be a theosophist is to have a hunger to know and grow into whatever is Higher, Deeper, and Eternal. It doesn’t mean we’re already there. Not one of us starts out as a fully-fledged and evolved Master of the Wisdom. We each of us start out from somewhere challenging.

Even once we are nicely along the path, it would help to see that we are team-mates in some Higher Work of service to humanity, but that we may still have personality issues to work through.

We’d do well to keep in mind that we each walk a separate path toward enlightenment, and that each has its own unique potholes and cul-de-sacs. Let us honor each other for working our ways past them however we manage to do so, and however muddy we may get our boots along the way.

I am absolutely amazed at the wisdom, deep truth, and heavy duty teachings in “The Gardens of Ailana”! I find insights I have never seen any philosopher or great spiritual teacher even hint at before! (And I hate using exclamation points) Every day it all just pours through – a thousand words or more in a couple of hours – and I am learning so much from each scene and passage. I feel like I am READING each chapter, not writing it.I am so very, very grateful for these teachings

Will be doing a reading from “The Mourning After” (and perhaps from my new book, “The Gardens of Ailana”) at the Quest Bookshop in New York City on Sunday, May 11th.

As she wandered back to her cabin, searching for any fond memories she might have buried from her childhood, light faded everywhere around her.

How about the coloring? Children enjoy coloring, how about that? She’d spent so many hours and days on her art. It was as close as she could remember to having her Mamma stand over her with anything even remotely resembling approval. Her books and comics could be tales of Jesus, but coloring books had to be Old Testament because “No child’s impure hand could touch a crayon to the sweet beautiful face of our lord and savior Jesus Christ.”

So the little girl had scrunched down over Daniel in the lion’s den. Samson, screaming, being blinded with daggers and torches. The redder she made the flowing wounds of a man of God shot full of arrows, or stoned to death, the richer the flames of three men being burned in a box, the longer mamma let her stay out of that closet.

But the men still came. Mamma had no say over that. The Cleansers from the church had to step in as her father, since women were weak and needed men to set them straight. Mamma had done the unmentionable, and that sin must be cleansed from the girl child.

Paulette had fought so hard not to hum while she colored, since music was sinful. Now she fought to lock that vision back into its box. It was as close as she came to a happy childhood memory, but even this one gnawed away at her insides.

As that long night of deepening terrors took hold, her room grew colder. The trees outside began to quiver, then wail. The winds rose up, gathering the darkness in around them.

She heard rivers running everywhere, whitewater roaring far off.

But it was only those ominous winds, scraping and clawing through long-dried leaves that should have been left to lie still, and die quietly.

“Most people seem to think so. I think they’d get lost if they didn’t have their names. People don’t usually know who they really are, but they do like to pretend.”

“People think they need a lot of things they’d be better off without.”

“That’s what my mom says, but I’m still figuring on that one.”

“Want a little help?”

“No, I think I’ll just let my brain have it for a while; I’ve got other things to do.”

Some very brief bit, only one or two short, very mildy distracting lines goes here.

“What do you like to eat?” Sylva, lost in her pondering, was all seriousness now.

“I like strawberries.”

“No, that’d be a dumb name.”

“How about calling me Cuthbert?”

“Now you are just being silly. Pay attention. This is important business. People don’t come here and leave here the same, so they should get a new name while they’re here.”

“Okay, I can see that,” he said.“So what’s your brother’s new name? Or is Renn his new name?”

“Renn doesn’t need a new name; he was born here. Only the pretending people need real names when they stop pretending so much. But some people leave and they still don’t know who they are, so I don’t name them.”

“Aren’t you the girl people told me doesn’t talk very much? Guess they didn’t know you very well.”

“Good point,” she said. So then she went back to thinking again.

As they studied the land around them it seemed indecisive, uncertain. It hadn’t yet made up its mind. Was it spring now, or had winter merely blinked? Were some patches of ivy brown, brittle, dried out and returning to soil; or were they looking for a bit of their green again? Had they given up, or would they once again decide to live? Was that which had been there last year coming back, or had they seen the last of it?

“Y’know, people really should listen to children,” she told him.

“I’m beginning to find that out.”

“But not when we’re just being children.”

“Okay, now that’s something I’ll have to think about.”

“It’s good to give each other stuff to think.

“But you don’t wanna make a whole lotta noise when you’re doing it.”

“You mean like talking?” he asked.

“And other stuff. Like eating corn chips.”

He started to write on one of his special lumpy papers. She saw him holding a pencil he hadn’t had before, but hadn’t seen how he’d opened his box. She decided she would just have to start observing harder.

She thought she’d give him something to write.

“You know you can’t pet a stumblebee on the back while he’s flying because that’s where his flying parts are, and that’s why they stumble.”

“Ah, yes. That would be so,” he replied.

“You don’t really scare them when you try to, but they would ‘Really rather you would stop doing that!’ ”

And then she was quiet again. That had been a lot of talking for her. She didn’t usually pay any attention to grownups because most grownups didn’t know very much.

This one was different.

Besides, he was fun to watch because his light went out farther when he thought about people.

It didn’t shrink in and get all hard like that crippled lady’s used to. You could hardly call hers light at all.

“I think I’ll name you Mica,” she told him, “Because you’re all shiny.”

“Mica. I like that. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Mica it is. I am now Mica.”

“You are Mica, the Shiny One.”

At end of day, Paulette sat with Ailana on the porch, unwinding from her day of exploration. She’d been thinking about how much she had learned back at the healing and meditation retreat without even knowing it.

She tried to remind Ailana now of one particularly lasting and memorable lesson. “When you told us to listen to the forest, feel that deep Peace, and take it inside us … Well that just changed me somehow.”

“Except I never said that.”

“It … but … You didn’t?”

“Why would I tell you to take peace inside you? It’s already there. All you needed was to find it. I told you to feel it inside you, not take it there.”

Gentle footprints of ripple wavered, dissolved, fading away to rich green stillness. All the world was ripening, finding its form, as the scent of new birth hid in breezes.

Paulette poked through the rubble left by long years of misconceptions she had once built her life on. By water’s edge she kicked through the jetsam of defensiveness she no longer need. Budding here and there throughout the wreckage she found the delicate florets of long-hidden kindnesses, just now peeking out through deep shadows.

Harve felt caught up in a web of lies the world really wanted, even needed to believe. They told him to his face, announced in banner headlines, that their world needed heroes. So in some muddled and disheartened way, he kept climbing into the costume they held out before him.

He couldn’t abandon them now.

Confession would get him nowhere; it would hurt a lot of people.

He was trapped.

And yet here was a woman to whom he had just bared his soul throughout a long night of impassioned weakness, and she seemed to understand. She stood beside him still.

In fact they seem to have connected even more deeply than if he had just stayed Mr. Mystery, or played the hero card.

Throughout this morning they’d been wandering. Heading off originally, each had followed his or her own directions, seemingly at random. Bit by bit their paths had drawn nearer to each other. Now the two new and tentative companions walked together, though not directly side-by-side, and barely talking.

Walking, pausing, reflecting; staring at trees right in front of them, or rocks at their feet, but not truly seeing them. They felt stunned, unnerved; bemused as things seen and unseen fell into new places. Like leaves after a great troubling wind. They felt both drained and refilled; alive with new mysteries and possibilities.

Like newborns, everything was new, bright, wondrous, but confusing. Nothing made sense, and yet they had to learn to trust, their hearts surging everywhere at once. This was a brand new world they knew nothing about.

After long silence between them, Paulette spoke.

“It’s so hard to find out all in one night you’ve built your life on beliefs that were just never true.”